Blue Dog Max Rose-- More Crazy Or More Brave?

If you vote for the lesser of two evils... you're voting for evil

I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan-- and without an army. I was there twice. First time was in 1969 and I don't mean to toot my own horn, but you had to be either brave or crazy. I was just coming down off a 4-year psychedelic haze (and worse), that some people refer to as "college." The Afghanistan I saw was wilder the what the U.S. Army saw, even though no one was shooting at me per se. I wound up being arrested and thrown in a hole they called a jail but I had a business partner who was part of the royal family and he got me out-- with my van and the 50 kilos of Mazar opium-laced hash I was arrested for-- at the Russian border, no less. I was crazy, not brave, just effin' out of my mind. What the hell was I doing there? And there are crazier Afghan adventures than that. That was just the simple, easy to explain one.

Reading David Freedlander's overly dramatic essay for New York Magazine on Blue Dog asshat Max Rose, made me think if he was more crazy or more brave in Afghanistan. Hard to say, braver than me, probably. But Freedlander paints a picture of one crazy jerk off of a congressman. He's 32, the youngest male member of Congress. AOC-- who Rose hates and is incredibly jealous of-- is the youngest female member. I doubt it's personal with AOC. He just hates progressives, especially loud aggressive ones. He's one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, although he seems to be making a concerted effort to move a bit more towards the center in the last few months, likely after pressure from the constituents he needs if he's going to be reelected. But he's still awful-- just how he sounds in Freedlander's piece.

His district-- NY-11-- all of Staten Island and a chunk of the most conservative part of Brooklyn (Mafia + Russians; Trump did well there). Freedlander paints it as redder than it is. Last year Kirsten Gillibrand and Andrew Cuomo both won the district. Obama won it both times he won-- and of course Trump beat the dreadful candidate the Democrats nominated. And Rose, a completely unknown and unproven Democrat running a cash-rich Republican-lite campaign beat Republican incumbent Dan Donovan 101,823 (53.0%) to 89,441 (46.6%). Rose won big in Brooklyn and a smidge better than a tie in Staten Island. Rose spent $4,395,518 and Donovan spent $2,661,359. [So far this cycle Rose had raised $1,395,673 and hasn't reported his third quarter yet.] His GOP establishment opponent, Nicole Malliotakis, reported raising $756,964 as of September 30. Michael Grimm-- yep, he's out of prison and running again-- hasn't reported anything yet. Trump's approval in the district is 5 points underwater.

Freedlander wrote that the last several weeks have turned Rose "into a minor political celebrity in his own right, after he became one of the last Democrats in the country to come out in favor of an impeachment inquiry. He announced the decision at a Staten Island town hall that was ostensibly about the borough’s gridlocked traffic. 'If I had hair, I’d want to rip it out,' he said, while blasting Democrats for coming out in favor of impeachment before any of the facts were known, and Republicans for going 'deaf, mute, and blind whenever allegations against the president are brought up.' So he blasted both sides-- but he also came down off the fence on an issue that’s very difficult to navigate for Democrats who need Republican support to win." In other words-- both sides suck, including my own-- but I'm here for you. Maybe Rose was brave in battle... I have no reason to doubt it. But politically, he's a yellow-bellied coward.

It is also part of Rose’s skills as a politician that he doesn’t come down from his coiled, bleeding-from-the-eyeballs intensity whether he is talking about defending the Constitution, the brothers he served with in Afghanistan, or split-tolling on the Verrazano. At the town hall, he told the audience that he wouldn’t let them or his fellow vets down while pursuing grave constitutional matters in Washington, and that nothing would distract from his fight with the Port Authority and “their outrageous proposal to eviscerate the resident discount on our outer bridges.”

...Rose had been hedging on impeachment for months. During the campaign against incumbent Republican Dan Donovan, he promised that it wasn’t something he would pursue, even as he said the Russia inquiry should continue apace. On Face the Nation soon after being sworn in, he rebuked fellow freshman Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s call to “impeach the motherfucker,” even as he made plain he had no objection to the profanity. As late as last month, he wrote an op-ed in which he urged Democrats to focus on their agenda: “We are in danger of losing the trust of the American people if we choose partisan warfare over improving the lives of hardworking families.”

“It was the wrong decision for Hunter Biden to be on that board. In no way, shape, or form should someone’s public service benefit their family,” he said, adding, “But if we are going to question Hunter Biden, we should also question Donald Trump Jr. and the way his companies have benefited, and not just Donald Trump Jr., but the other guy — the one who is even less impressive. What’s his name again? Eric! That’s right, Eric.”

The local Republican Party is hoping to capitalize on Rose’s shift on impeachment. “Staten Island is Trump country,” said Jessica Proud, a top GOP operative in New York who worked for Rose’s opponent in 2018. “They are very resistant to the notion of leftist elitists in Washington who are perpetually offended by everything. They view this as just an attempt to get Trump out, and I don’t see how it is going to serve Rose. It cuts right to the heart of the brand he is trying to create for himself, that is going to go to Washington and not join the partisan fray. It puts him squarely in the Democratic camp.”

West Brighton is the Ohio of Rose’s Staten Island district, the neighborhood that the eventual winner must carry if they hope to win the seat. And among these Oktoberfest-goers, the support for Rose’s support for an impeachment inquiry appears very strong. “Thank you, thank you, just thank you,” says one young woman who raced over when she spotted the young congressman. Teenage girls pose for selfies. An older woman rushes out of her car to tell him he is defending the Constitution. “You know what we say now,” said another woman, putting down her Pinot momentarily. “It’s not ‘You’re fired!’ It’s ‘You’re impeached!’”

Rose brushes past these encomiums. “I do not want to be here. This is the last thing I want to be doing,” he said when he at last made his way through the crowd and settled in at a back table at Jody’s. “But no one is to blame but the president. The president says he is innocent, so all we are saying is ‘prove it.’ But that is not what they are doing. They are not cooperating, and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

Trump himself raised the stakes for Rose when he retweeted a grainy GOP attack ad against him, one that sandwiched Rose’s face in between Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi. “Will happen to all of those seeking unlawful impeachment in 50 Trump type Districts. We will win big!” the president wrote.

Rose hasn’t committed to voting for impeachment, since it would mean the outcome is predetermined. And he is critical of colleagues who have been calling for it, or even fundraising for it, since the day this new Congress was sworn in. “This is a national tragedy. It is nothing to cheer on, it is nothing to sell T-shirts over.”

Rose should be a goner when he runs for reelection, his victory the product of a Democratic wave and a Republican who had lost his taste for the work. This is Staten Island, after all. Donald Trump won this district by a larger margin than he won in Texas. Rose is banking on being saved by forging a new kind of politics, one that makes an authentic connection with voters that enables them to look past his party label, that convinces voters he is on their side. Trump won, in Rose’s estimation, by convincing voters that he was on their side on infrastructure, on preserving Social Security, and draining the Washington swamp. Obama won the district two years earlier by promising pretty much the same thing, and painting his opponent as an out-of-touch plutocrat. In this context, supporting an impeachment probe seems like it could be a good gamble-- he’s not promising anything, but he’s also establishing himself as an independent, discerning agent for his constituents.

“The Democratic Party has been completely subsumed by this ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas,’ mantra,” he added, his voice turning into a pleading and effeminate version of Rose’s Brooklyn patois. “Oooh, I don’t understand why they don’t vote for us? Why can’t they be smarter? Don’t they know all we are doing for them? It’s the most offensive, patronizing thing imaginable. And it’s taken over the party. A better question would be: Why don’t they trust us?”

Rose calls his approach “centrist populism.” It’s not the populism of the right, which promises to be on the side of Staten Island cops and firefighters and gives tax breaks to millionaires, tossing in a side of racism to keep their voters’ suspicions at bay. And it’s not the populism of the left, either, which is unrealistic, wants to turn America into Europe, and is overly concerned with banning plastic straws. And it is not the centrism as we have come to know it-- a Mike Bloomberg/Howard Schulz/Third Way approach which, Rose said, “believes there is no problem that can’t be solved by a public-private partnership.”

Rather, he wants to double the number of people in unions, wants Apollo-sized infrastructure and energy investments, wants to kick the opioid crisis in the ass. And he wants to name names: the drug companies that keep your prescription-drug costs too high; the carried interest loophole that keeps venture capitalists paying less taxes than nurses; the feckless Democrats, who among other things, pledged in 2018 to not vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker, but then cowed to pressure and did so on their first day in office. Rose didn’t. “And it took me four months to get the five-inch heel out of my ass,” he says.

But ultimately it’s about winning-- especially winning elections in Trump-loving places. Today that means keeping your powder dry for the impeachment inquiry so that more people will trust that it is carried out faithfully.

“I don’t think losing is cool. I want the Democratic Party to be the party of Kyrsten Sinema and not the party of Beto O’Rourke,” he continues, referring to the congresswoman who in 2018 became the first Democratic senator from Arizona in 30 years, and the congressman who parlayed a losing race in Texas into celebrity.

“Losing is not as cool as he thinks it is,” Rose says. “When you win you get to help people, and when you lose you get to be a social-media rock star. So I don’t think Beto is cool, and I don’t think losing is cool. If we don’t win, we can’t do a fucking thing for anybody in a union, anybody in public housing, anybody that can’t reunite with their family because of a fucking racist Muslim ban. This is where it begins and ends for me, so fucking figure it out.”

Rose wants to be a political lifer. He doesn’t see why “career politician” should register any different than “career social worker” or “career teacher.” None of this is difficult. “What is difficult is what our teachers are going through, what our nurses are going through, what our cops and soldiers are going through. This? This is fun.”

He gets back in the car. He has National Guard duty this weekend and has to get home.

“I did not go to Washington to become everybody’s buddy,” Rose says. “I am not down there to be a part of the system. What I am down there for is to wage war on the entire political class.”

Congressman Max Rose is full of shit. He's in Washington to build himself a comfy career and set himself up for a future job as a sleaze-ball lobbyist. I wish pollsters would ask questions like this in congressional races. This graphic  is from the CBS poll that was released this morning: